Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Trump's Twitter Disclaimer

Gizmodo published a post last week detailing how Donald Trump deleted a misspelled tweet from his personal Twitter account and made the claim that such an action may be illegal because he has become president and is now subject to various record-keeping laws. While this legality of this action is probably not an issue, seeing as there appears to be no malicious act being performed, except to that of the English language, there was one observation that can be made from this - while that original tweet was deleted and subsequently corrected on his personal account one was also made to his official account:

The potential issue isn't what is in this tweet but a detail that can be found in his Twitter bio:

The detail in question is that he has a disclaimer right in the description - he is not really making posts on his official twitter unless signed with a "-DJT".

While this may not seem like big news, in light of the observation made by Gizmodo's original post about the application of record-keeping laws and official Twitter accounts, having such disclaimer appears to be a bit odd. Also, look at the snapshots of the two tweets above from both his personal and official accounts. They are both identical (ignoring the misspelling which was later fixed), with the official tweet lacking any signature from the president.

Granted, Trump's caddy-turned-Director-of-Social-Media Dan Scavino could have published this word-for-word tweet but this can also be a set-up to absolve the president of any Twitter sins and give the president somewhat plausible deniability. Basically, Trump has created an online fall-guy in Scavino to protect himself from any digital shenanigans that have plagued other politicians in the past. Also, this brings into question of who writes what on which account.

What is scary is that while this kind of post may have been loony in the past, it seems quite possible now. Will Trump be the first president to experience a real Twitter scandal?